There are hundreds of thousands of companies whose needs are so pedestrian (whether they want to admit it or not) that paying for John Carmack wouldn’t be worth it. There’s no La Liga team that wouldn’t get better (and wouldn’t make a shitload more money) with Messi on their roster.
Adding Carmack to one of the "hundreds of thousands" of companies would be like adding Messi to your local pub team: it would make it better, you'd win your local league, but it wouldn't pay the $20 million a year that would make it "worth it".
The number of companies that could consider hiring Carmack is maybe 1-2 orders of magnitude above those who could consider hiring Messi.
So purely from a recruiting standpoint; if this sort of phenomenon happens at an undergraduate level, I can believe that just having John Carmack on your team alone can bring more talent in, for potentially cheaper just because of increased supply.
Just because somebody can add value doesn’t mean that their current cost is equal to their value. Any top flight club in the world would fall over themselves to pay Messi’s weekly wages. Nobody wants to pay nearly a billion euro for that right.
You could argue that someone like John would invent a system in a few months that simply took a very low level engineering mind to run that would cover all those needs. You pay him for one year and get ten years of business out of his system.
There are 10x programmers, even 1000x programmers. They invent protocols, programming languages, databases, IDEs, tools, operating systems, cryptology, algorithms, frameworks and libraries that are used at all your 100,0000+ companies doing pedestrian stuff to do the pedestrian stuff. Try to imagine a completely closed source world where everything had to be made from scratch. What percentage of those pedestrian companies would succeed?
These people are and were giants that have provided billions in revenue to the world economy. That's indisputable. We stand on their shoulders, and because they are broad enough to look like an endless plain to us in the multitude, we claim that there are no giants.